Review & compare: best optimized Magento hosting for your site in 2016 (updated)

I want to have a cheap + optimized + best Magento hosting for E-commerce site!

Hi everyone, during 4 years of the administration of magentotutorial.net, I have received many questions from developers as well as store owners about how to choose the best Magento hosting for their online stores:

My website has 100 000 SKUs, which hosting or VPS plan is good for me?

My website has 1000 visits/day which hosting provider that I should use?

I have 9 sub-stores, which provider can satisfy me?

My customers are in the Uk, so do I need to work with the UK hosting provider?

…..

Many many questions about best Magento hosting like that in my inbox! You can find there are many reviews, comparisons on the Internet that tell you which is the best hosting plan that you have to choose, but in my opinion, you can believe or not that are bullshit! The only one that can answer the question is yourself with the detail information about your business: Visitors number, SKU numbers, front end optimization, location … That is also the reason why there are some Magento hosting providers like Peer1, Zerolag, Hostway … do not have a fix pricing plan for their service, you will have to negotiate with them to find out the best contract.

In some reviews on the Internet they only give you about 5 best Magento hosting providers and leave you alone to choose, but in fact, there are thousands of other hosting provider out there, if all of the customers only choose within this 5 one, how can others live till now and even grow? Lol! If you are a web developer, you, of course, understand that there are 3 groups of hosting provider: The big famous, the medium, and the small.

Big& famous Magento hosting providers give customers monster hosting which can pull your website to the Moon with no delay and down time, everything is perfect exclude the price ( Haha). Yes, if you are a big E-commerce and don’t want to consider anything except your business, you are willing to spend more money to get the redundant resource of hosting to make sure that your website is always in perfect status. This choice will keep your mind out of things like: “Hey boss, there are too many visitors on our website in this holiday sale, our website is down now, I will try to fix it in 2 hours“. Yes, 2 hours and you lose hundreds of dollars because customers quit! If you are rich and want to choose the best Magento hosting without caring about the price, choose this group.

The medium Magento hosting providers give you a medium hosting quality, at a medium price. Their customers care service is medium too …. yes, they are medium. 🙂 These are hosting providers who grow from small one but can’t pass the big famous one above. Almost of customers of them are current customers and some come from their partner. Because they have nothing special so they get stuck with their strategy, and I don’t suggest my friend use them.

The small Magento hosting providers give you a deal with a surprise price for a small hosting plan. They are often so dynamic, supporting is good, quality is no problem and they are growing. If your business is small and doesn’t need to use too much resource, try to find these small guys and save your money. Cheer! However, be careful with SCAM and terrible providers which usually offer your a low price hosting plan. You need to read more reviews and ask your community such as friends, famous dev … to find the good guys.

Okey, after understanding who are the people that we will have to work with to have the best performance Magento hosting for our website, we will try to understand ourselves:

1. The requirement of a good Magento hosting

Magento is an open source for who want to start an online business, it’s based on Zend framework and MySQL, PhP, so there are many things that you have to write down to estimate the right one. You have to list these factors on this checklist for your E-commerce store first before sit down and consider what is the best solution for you:

Some detail information about your store: What is the current Magento version that you are using, How many SKU, category, attribute that your store has? Each day, how many average and maximum transactions that your store created. If you are a just starter of E-commerce with small traffic, the best Magento hosting server for you is in the small group.

How many visitors that you have: How many visitors that you get one day, the maximum of real-time customers, how many sessions that these customers make, do you want to protect your site from dDos attack.

Bandwidth that your store will need:The fact that many Magento store owners complain about me that they always suffer overload server problem when I check, everything is ok except 1 thing! They allow customers to download some video on their server, you know that video “eat” so much bandwidth. If a customer download a video at 3mb/s speed, 500 customers will take from you 1.5 GB bandwidth. They have 5 videos, so everytime they loose 7.5Gb bandwidth because this problem. So try to upload your heavy image, video on another host such as Pinterest, Youtube. Besides, be aware of your growth, if you think that your business will grow fast, prepare to upgrade it earlier or suffering the down site problem or your business plan is just maintain and improve, save your money with a constant hosting plan. So estimating your bandwidth is one of the very important points to decide to choose the most suitable Magento hosting for your E-commerce website.

Hosting infrastructure that you will need:What is the current amount of storage that your website reach, and how possible it grow in the next 12 month? Do you need an automatic backup service or you will back up your site manually every day? What about long term log storage, PCI-DSS compliance, a fault-tolerant, highly available or load-balanced?

Do you rich?Yes, do you rich to nurture a monster or just enough money to invest in your business? How much that you can pay for your website to be online? You can handle all of the difficult technical problems or just want to focus on your business and pay money for developers who will take care all of these for you?

Are these Magento hosting providers are Magento master or just stupid guys who want to sell host?

The fact that with WordPress there is nothing to discuss after the sale, but with a complex platform like Magento, 40% of us will come back to the hosting provider to ask them to config or solve some bugs. And you don’t want to solve a problem with guys who don’t know anything about that problem ( lol). You should choose a Magento hosting if they meet these requirements:

Their hardware meet your minimum requirement

They can show -off some Magento sites which already run well on their server

How about a demo of your website on their host

Ask the suppliers about the common questions which are related to Magento

2. How many kinds of Magento hosting and which kind will be suitable for me?

What is host: Web hosting ( In short we call it host or hosting), and Magento hosting is the same, is a definition of a space to store the data in a data center, we often count it by MB or Gb, some big business need gigantic storage with up to TBs. The allowed data space for you is the disk size in the data center of a supplier, you have the right to upload maximum data amount under this mark. Depend on the different hosting plan, we have the different allowed disk size from 200 Mb or up to Gigabytes (GB). Magento requires at least 100 Mb disk space to run, but you have to choose a bigger plan for your store with many SKU, catalog, transaction …. Besides the hosting space, we have to consider some other factors of a Magento host:

The operate system of hosting server: Now we have 2 most common kinds of operating systems are Linux and Windows, with Magento we require the OS run the Linux 86 or Linux 86-64. It’s lucky that Magento can run on Linux because with Windows, we have to pay more for the same plan. Linux OS often runs on support services like PHP and MySQL.

Bandwidth: Bandwidth of your Magento hosting package is the data that be transferred between server and users through the Internet connection. For example, if you share a 10 Mb size, and there are 5 people download it. That means you spend 10 Mb disk space to store it on a host server and you use 5 x 10 = 50 Mb bandwidth for the 5 users. That is the reason why you need to upload heavy file on another host for people download if you don’t want to slow down your money site.

Add-on domain: Add-on domain is the number of domains that you can forward to this hosting, some basic Magento hosting plan allow you to forward only 1 domain. But with some pro or enterprise plan, there is no limit.

Here is the example of A2 hosting plans, a high-quality hosting that I have used and often suggest to my subscribers. 3 columns on the right are for Turbo, Swift and Lite choices for you:

Email account: That is the extra service that you will often be suggested by hosting providers, that is the email account relate with hosting.

FTP account: That is the number of FTP accounts that you can create and use them to give to developers, agencies … to fix or upload files to your host.

Free hosting: Free hosting is a free data storage service that often be offered with advertising on your website. You are allowed to store your website on their server free and they will display advertising on your website. But this is just the offer that blog or very small blog want to try. Because your disk space is very small and the bandwidth is tiny, with more than 30 real-time visitors could suspend your server. And with a big boy like Magento, never think about free Magento hosting. 😀 Do not be miserly with your business, invest and wait for the profit, hehe, I know that you are good at business.

Shared hosting: Yep, this is the most common Magento hosting plan! Some of us often call it hosting normally because hosting providers don’t want to use this word: “Shared”. “Business is my wife, I don’t want to share my wife with other big guys out there, understand baby?” Yes, that is the feeling of us when we see “shared” but you have to understand that these hosting providers are good at management, we just only use the resource from 1 hardware and out data is private. Our neighborhood can’t reach out data.

Pros:

Cheaper

You don’t need to know much about technical management, you don’t have to care about operating, update, back-up, maintain …. the providers will do all of these things for you.

Cons:

If you choose the low-quality hosting providers, it is possible for hackers to steal your data.

Low resource: yes, because the price is low so you have limited the domain, CPU, Ram or bandwidth.

If you are attacked by dDos or local attack, your neighborhood will suffer with you together 😀 However, with professional hosting providers, they already have the solution to prevent this.

Reseller hosting: Now this kind of service is quite popular with us, some of the dealers buy a reseller hosting package at Magento hosting providers, and with this kind of account they can use their account to re-provide their disk space and bandwidth to their customers. You can understand in simple that these guys buy hosting in bulk and resell it to customers.

Don’t use this kind of host for Magento site. Talk with the hosting providers directly instead of discussing with a dealer.

VPS: VPS hosting is a Virtual private server, it is the mixture of Dedicated server and Share hosting, solve all of the cons with Dedicate server and Shared hosting and take more advantages. The hosting provider group many physical servers to one virtual server. On each virtual server, they set up everything like a physical server, and we, as a customer, will you this virtual one. This is the choice for the medium business because it’s more expensive and difficult to config. But the result is very good, you can experience a service on your Magento site as driving a monster like the dedicated server but at a lower price which is higher than shared hosting a little bit.

Takeaway: If you are planning to buy an over $10 Magento hosting plan, and you have a technical staff for maintaining and config it, consider to use this beautiful choice.

Cloud hosting: This new choice is better than VPS for Magento, and shared hosting too. I have to say that although there are thousands of hosting providers out there confirm about their number 1 quality this new technology is the best. If you a bigger than using VPS and want to try a really powerful option.

Dedicated server and Collocated hosting: I don’t want to talk about this 2 dinosaur but yes. If you have about 1 million SKU, try this one. You will have a private hardware for yourself only, you can do everything with it by the support of Magento hosting providers. If you are really a monster in E-commerce, use this.

Email hosting: Email hosting is an online email service that allows you to create an email address like this: [email protected] . It’s more trustworthy, professional and private if you use this kind of service.

Image hosting: Image hosting is a service that allows personal organization upload image to a website. You can copy the link and send to recipients.

Video hosting: Video hosting is a service that allows us to upload a video file to a server. The server will store this file and we can view or download it when needed.

File hosting: File hosting is a service that allows you to upload any kind of file to the hosting server. This service is for storing large file like media file, google drive ….

Windows hosting: Windows hosting is a service that stores many websites on a data center which is running on windows OS. Each website has its private storage like Hosting controller, Plesk. These are some support technologies run on Windows:

Linux hosting: Linux hosting is a service that stores many websites on a data center which run on Linux OS. Each website has its private disk space with some software to divide host like Cpanel, Direct Admin. This is the most common kind of OS that we use for WordPress, Joomla, Magento. Here are some support technologies run on Linux hosting:

3. Top best Magento hosting providers for small, medium and big websites

As I said above, I devise Magento website into 3 groups: Small, Medium, and Big. With each size of your website, the technical knowledge you have ( or technical staff), your budget you will consider to let which providers work with you. Collecting information from over 1000 website ask me to help this year, and I am updating week by week the performance of each provider as well as their discount program to suggest you the best price as I can. Just follow and ask me anytime you can about your site, I love questions about Magento. 😀

Here are 3 groups of Magento website hosting solution that I recommend:

Magento Shared hosting provider that you should use:

Nexcess.net

With no doubt, the quality of Nexcess is extremely good with no complain except the price. Many of you ask me about the quality of Nexcess and reasons why the price here is too high compared with others. Now I have 40 webstores of my partners are running on Nexcess server with no problem, up time good, load speed is excellent, support is careful and quick. If you are running a big Magento website and want to have a best performance and willing to pay for it’s quality as well as support, I suggest this guy.

Hostgator is a affordable Magento hosting provider in the world with more than 15 years working in hosting service. You can trust this famous provider in the high quality service that you will experience. Everything we need to do is waiting for this supplier coupon code to get the best price. 😀

1 GB Ram

Unlimited Disk space

Unlimited Bandwidth

1 Domain

Hostgator always have big promotional campaign with high discount.( All of coupons, discounts of hosting and domain for Magento will be updated daily at this category: Hot news-discount-voucher)

Stable host

Stable host is a high quality hosting with all of SSD disk. This is my most favorist hosting provider because of support is quick and useful, Stable host doesn’t have HDD hosting plan, and the pricing is very competitive. Now Stable host is offering 50% off discount when sign up a new contract.

Now, there are small to medium 400 webistes of my partners are using this

guy to manage. The starting price is just $2.475/month . You can join these discount here:

( All of coupons, discounts of hosting and domain for Magento will be updated daily at this category: Hot news-discount-voucher)

Site 5 Magento hosting

Site5 is a well optimized Magento hosting for you this 2016, this provider has already provide special Magento hosting from 2010, that mean 2 years after the launching of Magento (2008). So you can trust this provider about the optimizing, Magento compatible support. Now There are 70 my partner websites are running on this provider.

Now, Site5 don’t have any kind of discount, I will update immediately if they offer.

Magento VPS providers that you should use:

Vultr

Vultr is the fastest growing VPS provider company till now, the marketing share of Vultr increase 23.42% in 2015. I have tried the service at Vultr and have to say that they deserve to be the #1 of VPS hosting provider in the future. Cheap price but high quality service, all of 150 medium to large Magento sites of my partners here are working extremely fast. They has offer the $50 free trial VPS service that you don’t want to miss.

Some browser can’t see the trial page, it will redirect you to home page. You try this link: Vultrl Trial

Guide to get $50 trial with Vultr

Digital ocean

Yes, when we say about VPS, It’s a mistake if we don’t tell about Digital ocean – a big brother of VPS provider. Like Nexcess, the quality of Digital Ocean is very good, allow your website run massively with high traffic and large SKU numbers. Now you can have $10 free to use professional VPS service at Digital ocean, I don’t now when this program will end so if you want to try VPS for Magento , you can go here to create a new account now. Today is just January, 30th.

Magento Cloud hosting provider that you should use:

Vultr: (Like above)

Digital ocean: (Like above)

4. How to test and optimize Magento hosting speed & performance

Yes, the numbers never lie us, in order to find out the best Magento hosting we have to test them to check the real performance of each hosting provider. In this post, I give you 6 ways to test the speed of Magento:

Solution 1: Loadimpact

Solution 2: GT metrix

Solution 3: Pingdom tool

Solution 4: Bliz

Solution 5: Webpage test

Solution 6: Dotcom monitor

Because this post is too long so I don’t want to write the detail here, you guys can see how I check the speed of Magento site with these tools here: 6 ways to test Magento hosting performance in easy.

5. 6 Hosting providers that you need to remember to forget

I don’t want to write this paragraph but yes, there are too many people come to me and complain about me about how bad they are, and here I want to inform you about this:

1. Mocha host

I think that this supplier is not familiar with you guys because it’s price is very cheap at just $1.95/month. The thing that I want to say here is that the website on Mocha host is suspended frequently and you get difficult to login through FTP connection and the support is really a surprise: they don’t care about us! lol. Avoid to use this hosting provider for Magento.

2. Fatcow

This guy is the same with iPage, there are a similar in the discount & promotion events and the quality is the same: bullshit. The common problem is poor performance, often occur downtime, errors 403 and 502 and the support is very slow. The interesting thing that I found in this provider is that the price is still high: $49.5/year. In 2014, it’s price just around $25, and now we have to pay 2 times the higher budget for the same quality. @@

Never use this to host your Magento store.

3. Bluehost

Yes, there are many people come to me and said about their experience at Bluehost that made I surprised. Yep, it’s surprising that Bluehost, with many years, achieve : the best shared hosting for WordPress provider and Blue host was introduced by Automatic – the development company of WordPress in 2012. But the problem starts to happen at the beginning of 2013 when all of my partners who hosted their website on Bluehost see the downtime status on their website. Tickets were sent but no one reply and this problem happened 2 months before I decided to move Bluehost from my suggestion page.

In addition, although Bluehost, Justhost, and Webhostinghub are using 1 data center but just only Bluehost has this problem when Justhost and Webhostinghub hosting quality for Magento is still good now.

4. Godaddy

Godaddy is the number 1 domain providers in the world with no doubt, the number of registration domain of Godaddy increase to about millions but why their hosting service is so bad that I have to list them here?

The simple answer is that Godaddy just offer hosting service as an extra service, and they don’t want to focus too much on this field. The worst thing that you may suffer at Godaddy are:

Difficult administration mode, Godaddy doesn’t use Cpanel

The loading speed is very slow with WordPress and Magento is extremely slow

The admin activities take a lot of time, you will have to spend up to 30 minutes to add a domain, 30 minutes to install WordPress and 1 hour for creating a database.

If you send any ticket to support department, you will just receive a normal answer with no value for you.

5. 1 and 1

With 1 and 1, I have to say that f**k! That is a nightmare that I have to experience with 1and1 hosting. It’s dummy that there is no Cpanel for you ( similar to Godaddy). You have to pay extra fees for support, there are many technologies that I saw on the homepage but I can’t see it on the back end. Never use this guy for your Magento website.

=> Say farewell to you, babe! Conclusion

Conclusion

When building a Magento e-commerce store, make sure that you choose the right hosting. A good hosting is one that meets Magento system requirement, server up time>95%, the support team is good at resolving basic Magento issues. Also, don’t forget to check real user reviews to ensure that you’re not hosting your site on a bad/untrusted hosting provider. When your shared hosting can’t handle your site as traffic and product numbers exceeded server capacity, then it’s the time to turn to Magento VPS hosting. With big-sized business, I strongly recommend using Dedicated hosting so that you can easily deal with DDOS, server issues and don’t rely on 3rd party organization.

Also, remember to choose a hosting that is placed in the country of your Market so that your website will have the better ranking on Search Engine result page. My last advice: Never go for free Magento hosting, this is not good for your long-term business as free Magento hosting has very limited support and server specifications almost don’t meet Magento system requirement

Have any question or feedbacks? Drop a line below.

Buy domain for your store at a lower price with updated coupon from Magentotutorial.net

Besides of hosting, another thing that you have to consider to set up a Magento webstore is buy a domain, so you can check this topic ( daily update) to find the best vouchers to buy your domain at just from $0.99 from famous domain provider like Godaddy, Name.com, Name cheap ….

Thanks for the lists, I’ve been using SiteGround magento hosting for 3 years and it’s very stable, meets most of my requirement, however, site loading speed seems not good. I don’t know that is due to Magento platform or SiteGround hosting. Any suggestion?

I’m using Nexcess magento hosting, its price is higher but this hosting is worth paying for. Never met any problem with hosting since using their service. Also, there support is great. Highly recommend!

I like Nexcess much, their support response is immediate. on the other hand Amazon EC2 and rackspace cloud is very good options for big databases website. Magento workds super fast on Nexcess Light Speed Server.

Hi Felix,
With 3000 products, I think you may consider GrowBig package of SiteGround. More detail here:http://www.siteground.com/features/magento-hosting.htm
Besides, It also depends on number of visitors/month. If you have about 40.000-50.000 visitor/month, my advice is VPS plan of SiteGround. Shared hosting can’t afford such huge traffic
Also, don’t forget to optimize your pagesize, keep it lower than 1.8mb (check page size here: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ )

With shared hosting, SiteGround is my choice due to its stability. Server up-time always remains at 99%, I never encountered hosting down since I use SiteGround
For Vps, I recommend you guys to use HostGator VPS plan, because simply, it’s affordable and powerful. I’m using Hostgator for my business site and SiteGround for its Blog